John Santos:
A big part of a project launch is really about momentum. It’s getting a student from zero to your momentum in a really quick amount of time, by way of walking them through this experience that kind of either mimics or models or in some way attaches them to the experience beyond the project launch.
Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of John Santos, environmental science teacher at High Tech High. John has been teaching for 19 years and working with his teaching partner, humanities teacher, Pat Holder for six. Together, they’ve done some awesome projects. The students have built boats in order to study the human impact on our coast. They’ve built garden beds and studied how industrial agriculture separates us from understanding our food. And to quote John directly, they built furniture as they considered the absurdity of existence.
This is John’s second time on the podcast. He’s got so much insight into the nature of teaching and learning in general and project-based learning specifically. He tests and refines his insights every day with students, which gives him something that most philosophers of education don’t have. I love John Dewey, but he didn’t have 19 years of classroom experience, and it makes a difference.
Today we’re talking about John’s approach to the project launch, and we’re focused on the project that he and Pat Holder are doing with their students right now. Here’s John to explain.
John Santos:
The current project we’re doing is called Sit, Think, Act. There’s three main areas of focus, and so the most obvious area of focus is designing and building chairs in which an audience can sit. They’re creating stop-motion movies that are meant to highlight a small fraction of their learning that starts at the Big Bang Theory and moves forward into future human existence, here in our solar system or beyond. And then the Act part is where they’re meant to collaborate with different groups in the community to have a biological or environmental impact.
Alec Patton:
In order for this episode to make sense, you need to understand something that I personally did not understand at first, which is that while I spent my teaching career thinking about the project launch as day one of the project, that is not how John and Pat see it.
John Santos:
I can’t imagine a project launch where students are actually creating something and experiencing something and gaining momentum being any shorter than a week.
Alec Patton:
That’s super useful because I think a lot of people do have in their head the project launch is the big first day.
John Santos:
Yeah, I think of that as the project banner. It’s almost like that we type up these project descriptions and we put them outside our classroom door in a frame and it’s like, “Here’s the project.” And almost that first day thing is almost like the project banner for the students so that they don’t have to read the project description. But I don’t know that that’s entirely the project launch. I think of that as a teacher’s way of communicating something with students. I don’t think it entirely is an effective or impactful way for students to start a project.
Alec Patton:
You talked about how it’s important that the project launch have an exhibition of some kind, a public sharing of the work. In Sit, Think, Act, how did people publicly share the work at the end of those two and a half weeks?
John Santos:
We had had students photograph pictures that were either representative of an environmental system in harmony or in disharmony, and then we had them build frames to frame those photos. We had them write cento poems and kind of create little teeny hangers for those. It was basically about kind of displaying those, and then what we did is have those students share their learning experiences with other students on the other team. So it was all in-house, it was all here at school, but it still gave students a chance to have their work authentically critiqued by an audience and it gave them a chance to reflect on a process. It gave us a chance to check in with students and say, “Okay, that was round one. What would round two look like?”
Alec Patton:
So that’s how the two and a half week project launch ended with an exhibition, just like how the full project would end. I wanted to go back to the start. So I asked John, at what point in the project design process, he and Pat started thinking about the launch.
John Santos:
I think when we’re thinking about any of our project designs, we never really separate the idea of project launch or for that matter, project exhibition from the project design in the first place. It’s constantly part of the thinking, is you’re trying to come up with these different project ideas and when you start going deeper on a project idea and really trying to tease that apart and see if it would work, part of it is like what would this look like as an exhibition? How would they share their learning with the community and what would that look like? But then also, how would this learning experience kick off? So it’s never fully separated and you don’t think of, ‘Whoa, now that we’ve got this project designed, let’s think about how we’ll launch the project.’
And so for me, I try to back up from it and think about what is it that I’m trying to get out of this? And so for me, project launch is this idea of within a project, you’re trying to have this kind of incredibly impactful experience on your community, on your students, on their learning in a relatively short amount of time. So a big part of it is just momentum. Us as teachers, we kind of design this project over a long period of time and so it sits in our mind, and we’re kind of up to speed on where this is going and how it’s going to go. Students are coming in fresh to the new semester, to the new year, and they’re just like, ‘We want to do well,’ but they have no clue how to do well.
So a big part of a project launch is really about momentum. It’s getting a student from zero to your momentum in a really quick amount of time by way of walking them through this experience that either mimics or models, or in some way attaches them to the experience beyond the project launch. So there’s the momentum aspect of it.
Then another part when you think about a project is what do we want from a project? And so there’s the obvious, we really want a project to be an opportunity for students to develop competencies that are kind of relevant. But I would say more so it’s like, what about having some choice as to what types of competencies they want to develop? And so a project launch really, I think of it like this menu where students gain a sense of the project, but then they also look at that menu and think like, ‘Oh, these are the different types of roles. These are the different types of ways that I can step into this project and kind of take it deeper.’ I think that has this initial impact that then has legs through the project experience itself.
Alec Patton:
What did you want to make sure kids experienced in the launch?
John Santos:
For Sit, Think, Act on our end, a lot of things. For the students what I wanted them to experience was I wanted them to go from being whatever degree they were unfamiliar with power tools, to being familiar with power tools and feeling comfortable with that. I wanted them to be familiar with the direction and the purpose of the project itself. A chance almost in a way for them to give it their own language of like, “Oh, this is what this means and this is what it looks like for me.”
There’s another one. I think what we want to get students used to is comfort around this idea that within a project, it’s not scripted. We’re not providing directions, and it’s really an opportunity for them to try things and figure things out. So I think that that can be kind of an overwhelming experience for students, especially in an academic setting to come in and be like, “Hey, we want you to try things.” And they’re like, “Man, I don’t want to try things unless I know I’m going to do it right, because I know you’re the person grading me.”
We’re really purposeful about within our entire project to launch there’s no grades associated with the work and learning that’s going on. There’s tons of conversation, there’s lots of support, there’s tons of assessment, but there’s no grading. We want to get students used to feeling like they can genuinely try things and see how that goes, and share perspective and ask questions. We want to get them used to almost, in a weird way, the messiness and the ownership. I think a big part, as I say that, is ideally a project launch is a chance for a teacher to hand over ownership. By the time the project starts, a student has a sense of what part, what portion, what role they’re going to own within that learning experience. So that’s what we as teachers hope for the student.
But what I hope for myself as a teacher and with my teaching partner is it really gives us a chance to set a process in motion. Anytime you can set a process in motion, there’s such a value to that to be able to stand back from it as the teacher and just take a look at what’s going on and find out who’s who. I mean, we talk about personalization, and I think to a large degree that’s a huge reason why we even use projects and project-based learning, is it’s really this long process that students engage in and you’re able to see how students engage with that process differently. You’re able to tweak your designs as a teacher and in doing so, kind of try to design learning experiences that meet specific needs of specific students.
And so as a teacher, a project launch for me is a chance to set a process in motion, step back from that and kind of see where my students are at and see which ones of my students are more extrinsically motivated by things like grades and points and really feel a need for direct instruction from me. And which one of my students are shy about collaboration or have a hard time sharing ownership of a process with other students. It’s just a great chance to see what’s going on and then use that to figure out how to even tighten that up a little bit better when the project starts. As I say, when the project starts, it almost infers that there’s a project launch and then there’s the project, when in reality it’s like it’s all the project.
Alec Patton:
And so for the student, they’re kind of experiencing the project and microcosm in the project launch. They’re doing the things that they’re going to be doing throughout the course of the project. And actually for you as the teacher, you’re having the opportunity to observe the students doing all the things that they’re going to do. So the students are learning about the project and you’re learning about the students as they will experience this project.
John Santos:
Right. Hopefully everything’s going to, as you move through it, start to look different because you’re going to make these initial observations and I think it’s really important to take walks with kids and be like, “Hey, this is what I’m seeing. What are you seeing? What are you feeling? And how’s this going for you?” When I say things are going to look different, it’s not all corrective. It’s not like, do this differently. A lot of it is take that deeper. I love the degree to which you’re owning this. I really want this to be a space where you can push that even more so.
Everybody’s using it so that actually you’re not just perpetuating some process. It’s not meant to be like, ‘Well, that was step A and then step B looks exactly like it.’ It’s like step B should actually look different as a result of the project launch. Thinking of the project launch like that, that the reason you have an iterative cycle in its entirety. So them going through all these motions up and including they exhibit their work from the project launch to a small community, but to a community, and they reflect on that, they get critique on that, is so that we could say, “All right, we did that. Now what is this going to look like differently as we move into the next cycle of this?”
Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. So the first iteration of the project is the project launch?
John Santos:
Yes. That’s how I see it.
Alec Patton:
Let’s go straight from the theory to the practice. For Sit, Think, Act, what happened? What happened in the launch?
John Santos:
What we were asking them to do is not just to build something, but to really conceptualize, design and build something, because we wanted them to see that it’s actually easy to build something when somebody provides you direct instruction on how to build it. But that’s not the value for us. The value for us is what would you build if you could build something? What would that look like if it’s the first thing you’ve ever built? And so that was one aspect of it.
And then the second was similar, but different in the sense that we wanted them to use their phones and cameras to create a very short, less than 30 seconds stop-motion movie. It didn’t really even need to have any sort of message with it. It was just really to start playing around with techniques in a way that they could film something, put something together and share that, and then look at each others, what those outcomes were.
And then the other one was what we wanted students to do is we wanted them to look at environmental issues here in San Diego and basically do some real basic research on that. From the research that they were finding, we wanted them to appropriate language from it and either do one of two things; write a completely plagiarized article where 100% of the text had to be appropriated from all of their resources, or write a cento poem, which is essentially a poem that is constructed of appropriated text. So those were the basics. It hits those three regions of building something, communicating through film, and then connecting with an environmental or biological issue that’s here in San Diego.
Alec Patton:
Why was it so important that they plagiarize?
John Santos:
Why do I want kids to plagiarize? That was more of us, I think in a weird way, just kind of playing around. I think also when students have to arrange other people’s words in a way that is cohesive and makes sense and communicates kind of what they want to communicate, they almost have to read it more and understand it more than just to be able to be like, “Here’s what I think about it,” and write it down. So I like kind of flipping the script on plagiarism. Hopefully that’s not going to make it into…
Alec Patton:
It’s the title.
John Santos:
Step one. Yeah, rigor through plagiarism. As long as rigor makes it in there.
Alec Patton:
What did you learn from seeing the students build?
John Santos:
What I’ve noticed over years and years and years of doing this is we have this assumption that freedom and autonomy to design something and create something is going to be completely and easily embraced by high school students, or by students for that matter. It’s interesting to see what school has kind of done to a lot of different students. The big thing you watch is how hesitant students are to really trust themselves to design something and make something. I mean, that’s not all of them. It’s really interesting to see the students who are like, “No, I’m actually really comfortable. I know what I’m going to make and you can’t stop me. This is what I’m going to do.”
But a lot of it is really just encouraging students to embrace their own ideas and then helping them. There’s this obvious thing of a lot of these power tools are incredibly dangerous, and so it’s helping students learn how to use them safely and become comfortable around that.
Alec Patton:
How did the stop-motion animation go?
John Santos:
So stop-motion animation I think is, it’s funny because there’s more freedom and even less scripted, but I think there’s also, in a weird way, when you’re building something, it has to end up as this something versus when you’re making stop-motion. I don’t think there’s that same sense of like, “Oh, man, if this doesn’t end up framing the picture, it’s no good.” I think that there was a little bit more comfort around creative liberties.
Alec Patton:
Yeah, a really bad stop-motion animation is still kind of recognizably a style of motion animation in a way that a really bad picture frame isn’t functionally a picture frame.
John Santos:
And maybe there’s something about the permanence of it too, of like oh…
Alec Patton:
Yeah, totally.
John Santos:
The stop-motions are, I’m sure they’re in some folder right now, but not hung on a wall.
Alec Patton:
What were your observations from watching kids plagiarize?
John Santos:
A lot of the observations end up almost being critiques of education itself. What you notice is that students aren’t that good at finding information when they’re tasked with doing some research. I think that’s for a good reason. It’s not because the internet is impossible to navigate, it’s that through much of their learning, people have basically given them what it is that they want them to learn. So students have information served up on a platter to them, and so I think that there’s this huge value to saying, “I want you to go find this. And not only that, but I want you to decide the direction that you’re seeking and what you’re searching and what you want to find out more about.” So a lot like that.
The other thing is we often assume that when there is this freedom, that students are going to really embrace that and have an immediate sense of what that means for them and what that’s going to look like. I think in reality, there’s kind of a little bit of a struggle, and it’s not really a commentary on the student. I think it’s more of a commentary on what school does to kids. They have this sense of if there’s information, they will give it to us. If we’re going to be creating something, they’re going to tell us what to create or how to create it.
Alec Patton:
I have one final question for you. For a teacher who’s maybe planning their first ever project and they’re like, ‘Oh, John Santos thinks about so many things when he designs a project launch and that’s overwhelming.’ What’s the one thing that a teacher designing their first project who’s like, “I know I need to launch it and nothing’s sticking in my brain. Give me something to hold onto.” What should they be thinking about?
John Santos:
Oh, man. I know you said one thing, but I’m going to give you more than one thing. Because what I think is important to say is that we often have this assumption that I need to get the kids ready to do this project. Even that sometimes includes, I need to get the students ready to do this iterative cycle or this project launch. The reality is that really, you are never going to get kids ready. You need to start a process in motion, and that is what’s going to allow you to effectively and impactfully teach students. So the first thing that I would say is don’t wait to get processes in motion.
Then the second is, I think the question you’re asking is, okay, well then this first process then is a project launch. And so step back from it and think, what is it that you want? I think of it as you want students to gain some momentum and you want students to connect and see themselves in the project, but basically… How about this for if there was one thing. What are they going to build and make and create and read and write and discuss? And then how are they going to share that? How are they going to do that in two and a half to three weeks?
Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to John Santos for taking the time to talk about launching projects. This episode is a companion piece for an Unboxed video called Personalized Learning through Collaborative Experiences, which also features John alongside Jesse Wade-Robinson, another amazing science teacher at High Tech High. There’s a link to that video in our show notes. Thanks for listening.
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